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4 thoughts on “XML aware front-ends and the talented MS Silverlight”

D’oh, my mind is almost filled with acronyms. Anyway, if memory serves, XAML is more or less an XML schema to describe applications’ workflows and user interfaces. So, a few random thoughts on silverlight.

Another XML schema for UIs. Why, didn’t we have XUL for, like, 4 years? Is this gonna be different? Could someone in the know please elaborate?
Another browser plugin? Aren’t we using enough plugins already? Java has been around for like, a decade and people still refuse to install the JRE. How are they going to install this CLR plugin? Oh wait, that one’s coming preinstalled with windows, right?
This one is going to be searchable. Like all other XML based technologies that were around for quite some time. Should I be impressed?
That one’s got vector graphics. SVG anyone? Is there a real reason to have yet another vector graphics engine inside our browser? Firefox and Opera have got a native implementation already. That means no plugins. Some cellphones already implement a tiny SVG subset suitable for mobile devices. Hold the presses, here comes VML V2 (capital V on purpose).
This one is going to be cross platform. Well, sort of. For the time being, only MacOSX and Windows.

I am not sure that this is correct, but I didn’t feel that Silverlight provides something really new or at least something that we can’t do with a recent version of Firefox. We already got XmlHttpRequest and AJAX, toolkits like GWT, SVG, Canvas, XUL, and Javascript. Oh, and Flash in most cases. Of course, as always, the devil is in the details. Maybe its just better integrated into one big happy product. Will people want to adopt it? Or will they want to adopt similar products like Flex for that matter? What do you think?

-About the VM size: The Java side is also well aware of this. I don’t know how important it is nowadays, but anyway there are already thoughts on creating a small JVM.
-About SVG. When adobe acquired macromedia, suddenly they had two competing products on their hands. So they tried to pull the plug on SVG. But the fact is, there were already solid implemenations like firefox, apache batik, opera, libsvg etc. SVG is here, they can’t make it disappear.
-I agree wholeheartedly on your third argument.